Robert K. Merton's ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: A SHANDEAN POSTSCRIPT

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675.

Memes are older than the Internet. We just used to call them "aphorisms" or "quotations" or "folk wisdom". And back before we called them "memes" they were pretty hard to trace to sources. Pretty hard but also, as mid-century intellectual delight Robert K. Merton has proven in his utterly wonderful On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, a whole lot of fun! 

Anyone who's spent more than ten minutes reading this blog knows that my favorite novel, probably ever, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I'll be reading again later this summer as not one but two of the Discord Servers I hang out on are brewing up giant buddy reads of this book. 

I'm going to encourage all of them to try to track down a copy of On the Shoulders of Giants (or OTSOG, as Merton himself has charmingly dubbed it and elucidates late in this work as a versatile new word which by all rights should have entered our vernacular but has largely been replaced by the less amusing but also less opaque "humblebrag") as either a companion read or a chaser. It's just the perfect example of what I've always imagined as the ideal way to live a life, as Casaubon attempted to do in Eco's novel:* be the "Sam Spade of Culture "

The mystery here being, while most modern people think it was Isaac Newton who first said "If I have seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants,"** intellectuals know he was condensing and paraphrasing a much earlier thought. A meme. But where did he get it? And where did that person get it? And the person he (or she, or [singular] they, but let's be honest, probably he, at least in that for most of recorded history only men got to record their thoughts in any durable way. So probably he, though who knows if he got it from his wife or sister or mom?) who passed it on from distant antiquity? But how distant? 

Helpfully, once Merton has spent many pages (in the form of a letter to Bernard Bailyn, whom I chiefly know as a the author of The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution***, a book beloved of libertarians, both with and without the capital L) teasing out the history and provenance of the phrase all the way back to the 12th century and perhaps to even earlier, he presents us with a helpful table suitable for copying out and hanging on the wall to remind us all that no idea is truly original, that immature artists borrow from the mature artists who originally stole them from Oscar Wilde, etc.

But so, OTSOG would really seem to have no business being as entertaining as it is, but the fact remains: this is the most fun I have had with a piece of non-fiction in years. This is because Merton, while a serious scholar, indeed the "father of modern sociology" (who has a lot of fun in one of this book's many digressions considering this matter of intellectual fatherhood of things like anatomy and physiology and many other arts and sciences) is also a very funny and playful writer, at least in this work, which, after all, takes its subtitle from the novel that was post-modern before there was any modern of which to be post-, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is a very Shandean work with its wide-ranging and curious approach to its subject, its willingness to stray off its mapped-out path (but always to find its way back. Eventually) and its overall tone, which, get ready for that.

Consider this, a meditation on the word "stand" into which Merton enters after spending some time comparing versions of the aphorism, in English and other languages, some of which are ambiguous about the position of the dwarfs in relationship to their giants -- standing versus sitting:

The OED**** requires 38 columns of tight-packed print to set out 104 meanings of the word and its various formations. After studying a few dozen of these meanings, one suffers and an attack of paranomasia. One doesn't know whether one is standing on one's head or on one's feet. In such cases, one must suppose, the only sound position is a stand-pat policy if one is to stand committed to truth and be prepared to stand the consequences. This may stand one a high price, but as things stand, to stand firm may stand one in good stead and may indeed be the only way to stand off abominable ambiguities. One must simply stand one's ground if one stands for something rather than nothing. If, I say, one stands for standards, if one is more than a stand-in for a scholar, if one wishes to preserve one's scholarly standing and to stand on good terms with one's peers, then one must take a strong stand. In the end each of us stands under the heavy obligation to stand guard and to stand to our guns in the face of the standing threat to single-sensed clarity. To stand upon ceremony in these matters or to stand much upon one's dignity would only mean that we have little else to stand upon. United we stand, provided that we do not stand upon our differences but stand together, side by side, rather than stand apart, aside or astrut. We must stand by not, not back, if we are to stand off the standing threat or at least bring it to a standstill. Only so, do we even stand a chance; only so, can we achieve a common understanding. This is no mean venture and the question is: can you stand it?"

This is merely my favorite example of the kind of writing to be enjoyed in OTSOG. There are so many others, so many fascinating nuggets of information and of speculation about the information he has found. When I first started reading OTSOG I was ashamed to realize that I had owned my personal copy for over 20 years; as I read, though, I found that only now, and maybe not even only now, had I the personal resources to appreciate its many pleasures: I already knew the names of most of the scholars Merton discusses, from my own academic studies and also from my repeated readings of things like Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of novels teeming with historical figures, including Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Samuel Pepys, who figure so deeply in the middle sections of the delicious gossip on offer in OTSOG.

It even gave me a clue or two as to where some of my other favorite works of fiction may have gotten some of their ideas, including, of all things, that of Tim Powers! A detail from his The Stress of Her Regard was very likely taken from a source mentioned in OTSOG, which Merton discusses when quoting from Tristram Shandy as the hero's father, still awaiting Tristram's birth, is trying to clear up a footnote:

Should you think this is just another invention of Stern's parturient imagination, you would be badly mistaken. There actually was an ignorant physician and man-midwife, William Smellie, who did indeed... mistake the caption of the drawing of a petrified child just taken from its mother's womb as the name of an author.

How could I not think of the detail in The Stress of Her Regard about a baffling section of a medical text being mistaken for the removal of a petrified infant when it was "really" (in Powers' delightfully magic- and monster-riddled version of the early 19th century) instructions on how to implant a tiny statue into a human body, to create a link between Powers' stony monster race and humans, to allow to monsters free reign in our world?

I have no idea how easily a copy of OTSOG may be to find these days; my own I got at an out of the way used bookstore in the middle of Wyoming at the tail end of the 20th century. It was exactly the sort of weird medicine I needed right now as we begin a summer full of stupid foreboding and anti-intellectualism at levels not even the most hidebound clerical authorities of the "dark ages" seem to have striven for. I needed its reminder that it is fun to be smart, that knowing things can be a source of enjoyment second only to finding things out. Your own joke about dwarfs and giants and seeing far here.

*Eco, you may note if you can read the crummy scan of the cover art that I had to use here, wrote an introduction to the edition that I own and it is every bit as charming and witty as we might expect from the god who created Causaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo.

**In a letter to fellow Baroque Cycle character Robert Hooke. I'm not going to pretend to be the intellect that Merton is; I first learned about Robert Hooke (and Samuel Pepys and many others besides) from Neal Stephenson.

***Who, based on copyright dates for the original editions of these two books, might well have been working on that very book while Merton was writing him this "letter." So yes, I might be reading that again soon...

****The Oxford English Dictionary, the latest edition of which runs to 20 volumes in print; it has since ceased to be published in print due to its mass, which is now measured in megabytes. Over 500 of them. 

100 Books #110 - Nicholas P. Money's TRIUMPH OF THE FUNGI: A ROTTEN HISTORY

When the author gets out of his own way and just lets us enjoy his material, Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History is as interesting and entertaining a book on the subject as one could wish. From Dutch Elm disease to the Potato Blight, Money surveys the history of fungal plant pathogens and their economic and aesthetic impact on the landscape in just the right amount of detail; one feels like a mycologist but isn't having to slog through a lot of soil chemistry data, which is enormously appealing to a lay reader like me.

What isn't appealing is a prevalence of what I can only describe as authorial snottiness; Money lets his personal opinion intrude on his storytelling just enough to be annoying, if not downright offensive: in his speculations about the origins of Dutch Elm disease, for instance, he tells us "I'm all in favor of blaming the Chinese, but in this instance they seem faultless"; pages later, describing the efforts of an early pioneer in research on a disease that all but wiped out coffee production on Ceylon/Sri Lanka, a pioneer who just happened also to be a reverend, he describes him as "a curate with presumable devotion to Christian superstitions" for really no reason at all other than to sound like a jerk, it feels like (to this reader, anyway).* Honestly, I can't believe an editor let stuff like this slide. Once I noticed this tendency, I couldn't stop seeing it, which often spoiled my enjoyment of a book for whom I am exactly the audience.

This is especially frustrating because the book is also full of fascinating bombshells of insight, as when Money points out how the results of a lot of early researchers in to Dutch Elm Disease had their results pretty much ignored because they were women, and a lot of dumb theories and ideas that came from men got credence, "frustrated progress in understanding the nature of the problem." Or when one Thomas Lipton -- yeah, that Thomas Lipton -- saw opportunity on Ceylon and started buying up rust-fungus-ruined coffee plantations to grow cheap tea on.* Or that "Plant pathologists can serve a [sic] excellent vectors of fungal disease." Or that the chromosomes packed into the zoospores of the potato blight fungus contain around 22,500 genes (for comparison, human chromosomes encode around 24,000).

See? Fascinating!

And we won't even talk about the chapter on chocolate. Oh my!** (Well, okay, maybe a little "...imagine massively swollen gentials in response to an infection of  your pituitary gland and you'll grasp a human analogue of this plant disease.")

But then the obnoxiousness makes a return in a chapter about fungal pathogens on rubber trees, in which the author makes as many condom jokes as he possibly can and throws in one about an exporter waiting anxiously for a rubber stamp in a colonial office. Har.

Overall, though, this is a great read. I especially appreciate the criticisms of modern agriculture that are gently buried in this text: fungal disease epidemics only really happen in monocultures; the bigger the plantation**, the bigger the problem. And while Money (wonderful name for a writer about economic threats such as these, eh) never says it outright, really, the worst thing that ever happened to these plants we exploit isn't really the fungi; it's us. Or maybe we're the best thing. Maybe these plants, like some have said that maize/corn does, are actually exploiting us, giving us a little something useful in exchange for our efforts to spread them, keep them bug and disease free, and in general let them take over the earth at the expense of other plants not "smart" enough to provide something we find useful or tasty?

And then, maybe, aren't the fungi the really smart ones, since they've let us humans do all the work of setting them vast banquet tables for them to enjoy?

Lots to think about, when we think about fungi, no?

*Oddly, the victim of this barb, Rev. Miles Berkeley, gets spoken of in seriously glowing terms later in the book. So, you know, why even make a remark like that in the first place? Once I got to the chapter wherein Money describes Berkeley as a "great man" all I could think about was this stupid dis earlier in the book. ARGH.

**And this after Lipton got into the retail business after his family fled the potato famine in Ireland, so "it might be said that Lipton was an improbable beneficiary... of two of history's worst fungal epidemics."

***Theobroma cacao... food of the gods, threatened by, among other things, Witches' broom/escoba de bruja.

****Some nicely subtle digs at slavery there, too.

Curiosity and Sonnets

One of my earliest contacts on Twitter helped design one of the experiments that we just landed with on Mars tonight.

This is Keri Bean, also known as the AggieAstronaut, at NASA's Johnson Propulsion Laboratory tonight looking pretty psyched to be seeing the first photos from our Curiosity rover, taken from her delightful Twitter stream.

And this is a sonnet I wrote a few minutes after Curiosity was confirmed safely landed on Mars and sending us a photo of its own wheel.

I have written a lot of sonnets about space in my day. Possibly more than anyone ever has. I watch launches and dockings via NASA TV and SpaceFlightNow and similar services all the time. But tonight was truly special. It felt like everyone on the planet was watching; the closest experience I'm likely ever to have to the Moon Landings in 1969, which I experienced as a fetus if not indeed a wicked twinkle in my mother's eye.

So I have just one question for everybody moving forward: Can we please, please, please, at the very least, have a box to check on our tax returns next year to give a dollar or two directly to NASA the way we now have for public funding of political campaigns? Please?

100 Books #69 - Mary Mycio's WORMWOOD FOREST: A NATURAL HISTORY OF CHERNOBYL

It is one of the disaster's paradoxes, but the Zone's evacuation put a stop to industrialization, deforestation, cultivation and other human intrusions, making it one of Ukraine's environmentally cleanest regions - except for the radioactivity - Mary Mycio in Wormwood Forest

Reading Mary Mycio's Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl may be likened to spending several hours listening to the Talking Heads' hit song "Nothing But Flowers" over and over again, but that would be selling the experience a bit short.

I had no idea, before reading this book, that so many people had equated the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant with the biblical Book of Revelations. I was 16 at the time it happened, eyeball deep in Michael Moorcock and Piers Anthony and Jack L. Chalker and research for Lincoln-Douglas debates on the topic of: "Resolved: that the United States is morally bound to promote democracy in other countries." So I felt badly about the disaster, worried about the fallout, but didn't have time for the wingnuts.

I still don't, but I do find interesting the biblical/botanical coincidence that led to so many people, including, apparently,  Ronald Reagan, to equate the accident with a Sign of the Apocalypse. The Russian name "Chernobyl" (actually "Chornobyl") is widely translated to mean "Wormwood" which is the colloquial English name for a plant common to that part of the Ukraine/Belorus/Russia, and also for the star that will shine like a torch at the beginning of the bibical apocalypse. But the plant we know as Wormwood is one they call Pollyn, Artemsia absinthium (so named because it is the source of the thujone that supposedly makes absinthe more than just another green liqueur), is not the plant they know as Chernobyl. That's Artemisia vulgaris, a related but less noxious plant that we know as Mugwort. Ain't the devil just in the details?

Wormwood Forest is full of interesting little nuggets like that as it describes how the natural world has overtaken and overgrown former towns like Pripyat, which town first came to my attention last year when I saw the film Land of Oblivion, set there 25 years after the disaster as stubborn former residents start coming home despite government warnings not to. And there are similarities to that film; the author's guide is a woman who lived there before the disaster, her memories haunting the account of Mycio's visit with a botanist at her side (Land of Oblivion's main character was a woman whose wedding day was the day of the accident, and whose bridegroom died in the first wave of emergency response efforts, and who comes to work, decades later, as a guide for foreign disaster tourists). Since that film affected me deeply, this book, which I believe was a primary inspiration for the film if I am remembering the director's Q&A after the screening I saw, too, bestowed chills along with its fascination and surprises.



Wormwood Forest explores not only Pripyat (actually it doesn't spend that much time there) but the town of Chornobyl, where some 2500 people, tour guides, maintenance workers (it takes a lot of minute and patient work to, for instance, keep pine saplings from growing on top of landfills full of radioactive debris and equipment sealed in clay to prevent leaks; tree roots would crack the clay and release the radiation back into the world) live on a rotating temporary basis; the Red Forest, where winds brought some of the most intense radiation and killed the trees, turning them red, now home to plenty of green "radiomorphic" ones that show bizarre growth patterns (the name Red Forest has stuck, though, and denotes one of the most radioactive places on the planet); villages where lawless squatters live in defiance of the government ban on permanent human habitation, who might take a fancy to attacking explorers like Mycio and her companions; the hidden cemetery of the small village of Novoshepelyechi, where oak trees show a higher incidence of Crown Gall disease than anyplace else and Mycio contemplates the hyphae of fungi thriving there, and how far those hyphae might carry radionucleotides because fungi can be pretty big, under the soil... and that's just in the Ukraine. And it was Belarus, now home to a thriving and diverse population of aquatic birds, that got the most radiation, possibly due to cloud seeding sending particles down in rainfall before they could reach Moscow.

Nor is it just plants and fungi that are now calling the Exclusion Zone (or the somewhat more poetically translated "Zone of Alienation") home. Moose and red deer (that North Americans call elk) and roe deer and wild boars are plentiful, and two endangered species, the European bison and the Przewalski's horse, have both been introduced there and are thriving, largely because human activity has all but ceased there.

And there are more surprises, like the news that actually, as far as insects that could survive after nuclear disaster go, cockroaches are pretty wimpy. And that you don't find a lot of mutant animals like the famous eight-legged pony that appeared on the cover of Time magazine, because in the wild, mutated animals mostly don't survive; a bunch of partially albino swallows, for example, aren't doing too well in the Darwinian sweepstakes because they can't attract mates.

Some people are doubtless going to find this book rough going. There is a lot of science, of almost every kind - nuclear physics, chemistry, classical physics, biology, biochemistry, geology, hydrology, anthropology, botany, mycology, soil science, heck, even astronomy if you want to count the odd mention of the biblical Wormwood star. And it's densely presented, this science; where other authors might (as I kind of wish Mycio had done) choose to define radiological and other terms in a handy glossary, Mycio informs the lay reader via digressions in the middle of her anecdotal narratives, a tic I occasionally found intrusive when she was in the middle of describing, e.g., weirdly growing pines in the Red Forest. I would urge those readers who do find the science daunting to stick with it, though; around and through the rads and curies and Grays and becquerels is a realm of strange beauty, wonder, tragedy and terror, a glimpse of another world existing within our own that stands as a warning to us all while still showing a small glimmer of hope.

Though not so much hope that we should continue ripping atoms apart willy nilly just to power our hair dryers and server farms. I was never a big nuclear power fan before (having grown up in the age of Three Mile Island, glimpsed smugly from afar in a way that only a hydroelectric power customer can) reading this, and I watched Fukushima** with as much horror as anybody, but now, now that I know, for instance, that particles of radioactive isotopes as cesium and strontium mimic nutrients that pretty much all life uses to build and maintain itself (cesium mimics potassium and strontium, calcium), there to sit inside of plant and animal and fungal bodies for years emitting alpha and beta and gamma rays that tear bodies apart slowly from the inside, and that they just keep circulating through the food chain for, in some cases, unimaginably long spans of time, well, I'm really not a fan of nuclear power now.

*I remember being shocked at all the houses and public buildings Land of Oblivion depicted, with large and healthy birch trees growing right in the middle of former living rooms and offices and storefronts. It didn't seem like 25 years was long enough for that kind of growth. Shows what I know about botany. Which is a severe failing on my part, especially given how much I know about and love insects and fungi!

**Which wasn't as bad, we're told, as Chernobyl was, but still plenty bad, thank you very much.

100 Books #33 - Charles Duhigg's THE POWER OF HABIT

I'm usually not so timely in taking up books that are in the news, am I? As a rule, I stubbornly withhold my attention from books that are getting talked up on TV or heavily plugged via SMDs and adds on sites I frequent. I still haven't read The Satanic Verses because I avoided doing so while everybody was, and just haven't gotten around to it yet.

That's a habit, but not one I'm too terribly concerned about, because I do not in any way consider it my responsibility to keep up with the latest reading trends. I'm generally more interested in digging up stuff folks might have missed, or at least in coming around to things in my own time. And anyway, no one is clamoring for me to become more timely.

But I have lots of other habits that do concern me. And I've been talking a lot with a good friend about them, and he pointed me to this book, half pop neuroscience and half corporate/organizational case study, and while I balked at the Kindle price (the agency model still irks me to my ears), I agreed to check out the sample.

What I found in that sample was intriguing as hell (Duhigg, if snagging readers like me was a priority, did it right in leading off with interesting neuroscientific case studies), and my friend was so persuasive about the book's worth, that I decided I'd pay the inflated Kindle price and get the whole book -- which I was then unable to put aside for others like I usually do -- just this once.

A habit I'm trying very, very hard to fight is that of being price insensitive to books, and buying them on impulse, which having a Kindle makes very, very hard to defeat. Um.

So just as, once upon a time, I decided I needed to learn more about insects to overcome my overwhelming phobia for them (my friends already know how well that took!), it seemed like it was time to learn about habits, how they develop, how they work, how they can, perhaps, be altered if not eliminated.

Enter Mr. Duhigg, a reporter for the New York Times and a wonderfully curious person as well as a fine distiller of stories and facts into useful narratives and arguments. His book is a lot lighter on neuroscience than I'd expected, but the anecdotes he has shared about how habit works and how it can be exploited, for good or ill, are fascinating in the same way Freakonomics is fascinating; that is, his examples and stories are very good at illuminating some of the secrets behind our behavior, which it is very good, in this world we've created, to know, because other people know, and are going to use that knowledge to guide and govern us (see the magnificent BBC series Century of the Self for more on that) whether we like it or not.

But we all, most of us anyway, know that already. What's really interesting about Duhigg's book is what it has to say about changing habits, about deliberately reprogramming yourself to divert bad habits into better ones (there is ample evidence that habits never go away, so one cannot hope to eradicate them, alas). It requires quite a bit of self-reflection, which may be an activity alien to some but is worth doing in its own right. One first must notice the cues, the triggers that cause one to engage in the habitual behavior, and then must identify the reward he or she enjoys as a result of indulging the habit (pleasure, relief, conformity, etc.). These are not going to change. What can change is what happens between cue and reward: the routine. An example in the book is nail biting, which a young woman managed, with effort, to replace with knocking her knuckles on a hard surface when the nervous cue to bite them occurred -- the reward, she had found, for biting her nails was the stimulation she felt in her fingers, which could be had in other ways.

This is not, though, a self-help book; it's more of an inquiry into how habits affect us on the individual level and on a larger scale. Lots of examples from Starbucks' corporate culture (which seems to have taken on the mission of making up for the lack of training in discipline and self-control on the part of parents and the public education system), from how Alcoa turned itself around by focusing on developing organizational habits that promoted the control of perfect safety records, and Olympic multi-medalist Michael Phelps' deeply ingrained preparation routines, which he has been working on since he was seven years old, illustrate how deliberate habit cultivation (again, identifying a desired habit and then finding the proper cue and reward to encourage it) can make a positive difference in a single human life or in a giant corporation or church.

Oh, and an early student of deliberate habit-forming and -changing? William James.

Whether you're seeking to make changes yourself (I've made some plans as I've read this book) or just interested in how other people do it, this is a good read for curious people. I'm glad I took my friend's advice about it!

But I'm still worried about the whole Kindle thing.

100 Books 77 - David McRaney's YOU ARE NOT SO SMART

I've picked up a few popular neuroscience "your wacky brain" books this year -- Kluge, Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite, etc -- and they've all been pretty interesting, but only one of them had me racing along, relatively unable to put it down*, and that was You are Not So Smart.


I've been a fan of author David McRaney's blog of the same name almost from the beginning, so I wasn't expecting to see a lot of new material here. I was pleasantly surprised on that score, though: while a lot of the same ground is covered, it is covered more elegantly, phrased and explained better for the layman. If the blog is a mid-level IT support guide, this book is an end-user's manual, full of well-chosen examples and analogies covering all of the classics that are somewhat old hat to a pop neuroscience freak like me but are still things it's good to be reminded of. And re-reminded. And re-re-reminded.

When it comes to this stuff - the sunk cost fallacy, confimation bias, etc. -- we're fighting a mostly losing battle to overcome it. Our first job is, of course, to notice it -- but that's something our brains, great energy hogs that have evolved to use the energy they hog as efficiently (meaning lazily) as possible, resist noticing these errors entirely without fairly strenuous conscious effort. I think in the end that only exposure, over and over again, to these sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes ungraspable, sometimes embarrassing but always fascinating truths can help us.

What I've really been looking for as I've sifted through the pop neuro section is precisely what You are Not So Smart is: a handy dandy pocket guide to the way my brain might betimes be failing me, and what I can do about it.

It lives on my Kindle. I shall consult it often. Perhaps even between chapters of other books I'm reading (see asterisk note below).


*I say relatively unable because, well, if you haven't noticed, I'm one of those monkey-minded maniacs who is reading sometimes as many as a dozen books at a time. I used to think it was bad enough when it was just three or four, back when lugging around dead tree was my sole option, but the Kindle revealed to me the true depths of my depravity. But hey, it's not like I don't finish them, eventually.

100 Books 76 - Robert Zubrin's HOW TO LIVE ON MARS

Half science, half science fiction, Robert Zubrin's How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet is a fantastic read for anyone who is interested in the possibility of permanent human habitation of other worlds -- except for one thing. The Kindle edition seriously blows, the single worst ebook experience I have ever had. I think someone at Three Rivers/Random House scanned in a 14th generation photocopy of the uncorrected manuscript and didn't even bother to proofread the OCR errors afterwards*. It's truly shameful. Never again can anyone from Big Publishing sneer at any self-published author's efforts.

Which is a terrible pity, because that aside, this is a fun, fascinating book.

Written, as the title suggests, as a guidebook for new immigrants to the hundred-year-old human settlements on Mars, Zubrin's work has an amusing narrative voice, a ton of practical science lessons and a tremendous amount of imagination. Some readers will dislike its Heinleinian/Libertarian bent (there is an excursis on global warming on earth, which Zubrin maintains is/was a good thing, that will make a lot of you blink hard), its presupposition that you as both reader of the copyright 2008 semi-fiction text and a prospective future immigrant to the well-established colonies in a century or so, are planning your move to Mars to get away from Big Government oppression and start a one-person Galt's Gulch with all the other Galts on the red planet, its focus on the profit motive -- but if she can get past that (and the disgraceful typesetting), the reader will very likely be charmed, as I was, by the vividly imagined realities and possibilities of human colonization of the rest of the solar system.

Zubrin is an aerospace engineer in real life, so all of his proposals for how to meet survival needs (cracking soil and rocks for water, etc) as well as for how and why to settle the place at all (as well established in his The Case for Mars) are thoroughly backed up with all the science and math the reader could wish for (or skip over, if one is feeling lazy), but he never gets dull or pedantic, never drops character. From start to finish, he is the imaginary author (bitching about Random House's lawyers and all) of a cheeky samizdat survival guide, brash, opinionated, digging into the reader's ribs and patting himself on the back for having had the foresight to get there first and invest wisely in the best companies that are out there busily exploiting humanity's next great habitat.

That it managed to be this much fun despite the constant extra effort of parsing past missing "Ls" and nonsensically broken words and giant run-on unintentional portmanteaus is truly remarkable, and as such I would recommend it to anyone looking for something a little different to read. It would also make pretty decent reference material for sci-fi writers. But in either case, get this one on Dead Tree. Or just pirate it. I bet the pirates did a better job than Random House did.

Morons.

*Here's just one example -- and it's far from the worst: "toputanatmospherinan un reinfo reed brick house on Mars."

100 Books 72 - Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's THE 10,000 YEAR EXPLOSION: HOW CIVILIZATION ACCELERATED HUMAN EVOLUTION

I actually read this book a while ago. I try not to put too much significance on the fact that I'm only blogging it now. The 10,000 Year Explosion is a fine book. It covers a subject I'm genuinely interested in. It makes an argument that I do find compelling.

But, like with Sex at Dawn, I'm probably very much a singer in the choir this book is preaching to.

It is always seemed obvious to me that human beings are still evolving. We talked in middle school about how our earlobes and pinky toes seem to be disappearing, physiological variations among ourselves, the uselessness of the appendix... So I don't find the argument that evolution did not stop when species Homo sapiens sapiens first thought to bang the rocks together, guys, to be at all controversial.

Nonetheless there's lots of neat stuff to explore here. The authors do a wonderful job of pointing out just how much we been able to learn about ourselves due to modern advances in the science of genetics. The study of genetic drift, the research into just how much Neanderthal DNA we might all still have, how certain have come to prevail in certain human populations, is all quite fascinating.

For instance, I am lactose tolerant because early herders in the steppes of Eurasia somewhere gave rise to a genetic sport who was able to keep drinking milk into adulthood, who thus thrived and produced just enough offspring to let his mutated gene drift into the population. Human migration and the fact that were not as a species really completely monogamous help to spread and become commonplace among my ancestors.

I love that I can drink milk eat yogurt (which I quite enjoy making myself) and have bones so strong that no bicycle crashes yet broken them. I am descended from a long line of stupendous badass evolutionary successes. And so are you.

Unfortunately none of my ancestors developed any helpful mutations that make me well-suited to sit in an office frantically typing and mousing (mousing with two hands by the way) for 10 hours a day. The people who do will own the future and have an obligation to have a lot of unprotected sex. For the good of the species.

But meanwhile, someone smarter and maybe a little more patient than I am, heritable traits perhaps both, developed the software I'm using to create this blog entry.

Dragon, baby: when you can't afford to wait for evolution.

100 Books 63 - Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's THE 10,000 YEAR EXPLOSION: HOW CIVILIZATION ACCELERATED HUMAN EVOLUTION

Short version: No, humans did not stop evolving 10,000 or even 4,000 years ago. We still are, in lots of fascinating little (and big) ways. And sadly, no, not all people are created equal. As many of us have inherent biological advantages as disadvantages -- and some people have both all at once. Interesting read, but I am pretty much part of the choir Cochran and Harpending are preaching to.

Long version: will try for an AudioBoo later this weekend. Typing is still to be kept to a minimum.

100 Books 51: Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jetha's SEX AT DAWN: THE PREHISTORIC ORIGINS OF MODERN SEXUALITY

I am very much a singer in the choir this book is preaching to, but I can see where some might find it controversial, yes I do. First of all, it concerns evolution quite a lot, which is still (amazingly, to me) a hot-button issue in many circles. Second, it concerns sex, which is pretty much the most fascinating* topic we've yet found to talk or write about but which lots of people really rather wouldn't. And third, it's a thumping great, thoroughly researched, entertaining, funny and well-researched argument against monogamy as anything but an artificial cultural constraint.

Nor is sexuality the only sacred cow getting a goring in this fantastic (but sigh! too short -- my Kindle led me astray again. Oh hey, I'm only 59% of the way into the book, yay! Oh wait, 40% of the book is endnotes. Aaaaah!) book: the work of a lot of well-known anthropologists and thinkers gets a beady-eyed look from the authors, who find the logic of, e.g. the Hobbesian notion that prehistoric life was "nasty, brutish and short" rather wanting, both on its own and in the light of contemporary research and the evidence it has found that our ancestors were freer, healthier, less stressed out and more laid-back than we can even imagine being today.

I don't want to spoil Ryan's and Jetha's arguments, which are wonderfully presented, as to how our evolutionary history and our present-day biology argue that promiscuity and not fidelity is our natural sexual state; I will say this is not written as a set of excuses to offer one another. That's not the intent of the book; indeed, the authors encourage frank communication between partners or potential partners. Knowledge is power, and I, at least, can see how honestly confronting the facts of our biology can strengthen, rather than weaken, relationships. Sure, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, for instance, but having the balls to ask permission and begin a dialogue about the realities of our minds and bodies seems to me ultimately less costly than asking for forgiveness after feelings are hurt and trust is shattered and pride is at stake. But you've got to be brave. And if you're not brave, what are you doing dallying with the opposite (or same, if that's what you prefer) sex (or both) in the first place?

Along with Rings of Saturn, Inverted World and The Hidden Institute, Sex at Dawn is one of the best books I've read this year.

TIFF 2011: Sebastian Brahm's ROMAN'S CIRCUIT (EL CIRCUITO DE ROMAN)

Movies have given me many sensations over the years. Linklater's A Scanner Darkly and Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, for instance, both got me what I can only call high; Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain made me feel I was being metaprogrammed a la Robert Anton Wilson... there are others, you get the idea.

Sebastian Brahm's first feature, Roman's Circuit, though, is the first one that made me feel like a guinea pig.

Whut?

To quote Inigo Montoya, let me esplain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Roman's Circuit concerns an odd and upsetting stage in the career of Roberto Roman, a neuroscientist of some renown. As a young man, he shipped a groundbreaking theory of memory migration -- the process by which memories mutate over time from a straight-up record of an event or period into a conscious narrative, which he says happens when different "circuits" of the brain take up these memories over time -- under the guidance of a mentor for whom, years later and somewhat washed up, he returns to work with. Said mentor being his mother's boyfriend. And Roman's ex-girlfriend is dating a departmental rival. And the department is encountering opposition to its experimentation, which relies a lot on animals. And stuff.

But the plot isn't really the thing here, cut up into shards of revelation and startling image as it is.

Brahm has done something quite subtle and remarkable here. As the film opens, we are given pieces of story, exposed to ideas and images and dynamics; we are given the raw stuff, in fact, of a memory. And as the film continues, it and our own brains integrate more ideas, more layers, more elements that subtly but profoundly change our understanding of what's going on. Our memories change, and with them our reactions to certain repeated scenes and images -- the poster falling down as seen in the trailer above, for instance, is seen several times and has different overtones each time.

Think on all of that for a moment. Do you have memories that have maybe changed over time? My own experience here bears out what I'm saying quite vividly. For instance, my ten-year class reunion was a revelation: lots of people I thought I'd known very well (ours was a small school in a small town and 90% of my graduating class had been in pre-school with me), remembered a whole lot of things a whole lot differently from how I recalled them, were sometimes completely backwards about things. Or was I?

It thus occurred to me, about 2/3 of the way during the film, that given that animal research is becoming more and more problematic, scientists are perhaps someday going to have to develop new methods of experimentation. And mightn't one of them, for neuroscientists and psychologists at least, be narrative film?

I got the opportunity to ask this of Brahm, more generally in the Q&A (TIFF tickets are worth the expense just for the Q&A, they really, really are) and in person after the screening. He smiled at the thought, kind of mysteriously, and seemed taken with the idea.

So I wonder what kind of data point I form...

100 Books: 10 - James Hannam's GOD'S PHILOSOPHERS

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by John Hannam - Icon Books

I'm still kind of making up my mind about whether or not I *liked* God's Philosophers. Its subject matter is very much up my alley and it's by no means a poorly written or unreadable book, but...

But...

On the one hand, I am not a fan of revisionist history, and this book at times feels like exactly that: a sometimes haranguing and opinionated effort to prove that "The Dark Ages" is a perjorative and misleading term for the historical period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, that the Renaissance couldn't have happened had not medieval thinkers prepared the way for it, that scholasticism shouldn't ever have been mocked.

On the other, well, I am keenly aware that I have reached a certain stage in life in which a lot of the stuff I was taught as fact in primary and high school is out of date, inaccurate, maybe just plain wrong. I speak not just of cherished juvenile memories of brontosaurs and a system of nine planets but also subtler matters like the characters of presidents and other leaders (many of whom we never even studied; shocking but true, we never talked about John F. Kennedy OR Martin Luther King in my elementary, middle or high school curricula). I like, whenever I can, to redress these defects, fill in these lacuna in my education, and so I deliberately seek out material like this that deliberately and systematically challenges something I've long taken as a given: in this case, that the almighty Catholic Church kept science down in various ways.

Of course, as Hannam is quick to stress, what we think of as science didn't really exist in the period his book covers; modern science with its rigorous schema of hypothesis, experimentation, analysis and peer review is a product of the last century or two at best (even the word "scientist" was only really coined in the 18th century). But, he asks, is it really reasonable to believe that those who would have been were just ground down by the ecclesiastical and secular powers that were? Was knowledge deliberately suppressed and kept from us and questions banned from being asked?

Well, Hannam says, yes and no.

A lot of names familiar to people who read a lot of Umberto Eco and his ilk surface all over the place here: Bernard of Clairvaux, Ansemlo d'Aosta (aka Anselm of Canterbury -- wink wink to those who love Foucault's Pendulum), Peter Abelard (of Abelard and Heloise fame, you fans of Being John Malkovich), the Merton Calculators, and of course Galileo and Paracelsus and Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas. Each gets a brief moment in the spotlight alongside some names unfamiliar to any but the dwellers in deep academe like Nicole Oresme, who discussed the notion that the earth rotates on an axis a hundred years before Copernicus did -- it's these little tidbits and new names that are the most attractive feature of God's Philosophers.

What is less attractive is, for lack of a better word, the tone of the book. While ordinarily I'm something of a fan of a certain kind of prickly cultural criticism (Paul Fusell is an old favorite), I find I don't like it nearly as well when it seems chiefly employed in the service of haranguing me about how grateful I should be to the Catholic Church; the implication appears over and over that had it not been for the Church and its hierarchy and its (grudging!) acceptance that Aristotle was right about a few things and maybe Plato was, too, the Renaissance could not have happened, but anyway, all of those ideas that our Renaissance heroes had, well, good little church boys thought of them first. Except for the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun -- Hannam lets Galileo keep that one. Mostly.

Hannam is especially down on the humanists, whom he describes as "incorrigible reactionaries" "bent on recapturing an imaginary past" in their focus on recovering nearly-lost Greek and Arabic knowledge. Not since the latest radio preacher rant against those nasty secular humanists have I seen that term used with such venom, and the book seems rather thin on evidence to support this characterization. Because they weren't interested in leafing through page after manuscript page of torturous arguments and reasonings trying to reconcile Aristotle's writings on mathematics and physics with Christian doctrine and scripture in quest of the odd scrap of something that may, possibly, sort of, kind of lead to a conclusion about how actual nature actually works, they were bad guys? Really?

That aside, there is still lots of fascinating stuff. Hannam and some of his colleagues are the first in a long, long time to actually be willing to comb through all of that scholasticism in quest of the germs of ideas our culture has embraced and let flower, and the truth about us as a species that it reveals, that mankind has always been curious and intelligent and interested in the real world no matter what the era, is an inspiring one. We didn't all drink the Christian Kool Aid in A.D. 700 and stop thinking for ourselves, even if most of us were illiterate peasants. The Kool Aid maybe wasn't a smart drug, but it wasn't a brain killer, either, and it the society it shaped did have a certain framework for investigating the natural world that kept our quest for knowledge moving forward, if slowly. I get it.

But man, sometimes this guy's attitude about it a lot to stomach.